February 28, 2023

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

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Welcome to The Node. This is Daniel Kuhn and Prachi Vashisht, here to take you through the latest in crypto news and why it matters. In today's newsletter:

In the news: Coinbase will delist the Binance USD stablecoin beginning next month. Binance reportedly sent $1.8 billion of stablecoin collateral to hedge funds. And Yuga Labs will mint Bitcoin NFTs on Ordinals.
The takeaway: NFT artist Brian Frye looks into the tax implications of NFT investors who donate their inaccessible tokens.

Binance Bucks

Coinbase will suspend Binance USD stablecoin trading starting March 13 as it fails to meet its listing standards. The decision was "based on our own internal monitoring and review processes," a spokesperson said, and will not impact users' ability to withdraw their funds. Meanwhile, Binance moved $1.8 billion of collateral, meant to back its customers' B-peg USDC stablecoins (a replica of USDC native to BNB Chain), to hedge funds including Alameda Research last year, reports Forbes. Binance's chief strategy officer said moving stablecoin collateral between wallets was common practice and "there was no commingling" of funds. Finally, trueUSD (TUSD) rose to become the fifth-largest stablecoin in the market as Binance minted over $130 million worth of TUSD in the past seven days.

NFTs Secured

On Monday, Bored Ape-parent Yuga Labs, one of the largest non-fungible token companies, announced it will release an NFT collection minted on the Bitcoin-based Ordinals protocols. The collection named TwelveFold will feature 300 generative art NFTs and will include 3D elements along with hand-drawn features. This comes after Twitch streamer Kyle Jackson sold his winnings from Yuga Lab's Dookey Dash NFT game. The sale netted him approximately $1.6 million, down from Jackson's listing price of $3.6 million on OpenSea. Elsewhere, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr has taken to social media to call out the auction for an unauthorized Ordinal NFT that incorporated his name and code without his consent. Finally, MyAlgo, a native wallet for the Algotand blockchain network, advised users to withdraw funds following last week's $9.6 million exploit that reportedly affected 25 wallets. The exploit did not result from an underlying issue with Algorand, said Algorand Foundation Chief Technology Officer John Woods.

High Finance

Leading Japanese firms, including Mitsubishi and Fujitsu, are teaming up to create an open metaverse structure called Ryugukoku to expand Japan's Web3 strategy. The alliance will connect users to different Web3 services created by government agencies and companies by providing a framework to tap into Web3 marketing, work reforms and consumer experience initiatives. Meanwhile, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision sent Robinhood Markets an investigative subpoena regarding its crypto listing, custody and other operations. The company has also received a similar subpoena request from the California Attorney General's office. Robinhood is cooperating with that investigation. Finally, cryptocurrency conglomerate (and CoinDesk parent) Digital Currency Group reported a loss of $1.1 billion last year. The firm is currently restructuring and selling off assets.

Sound Bites

"People who own crypto at the moment are kind of in it for the long haul. They're not really buying it from a tactical perspective. They're in it, but they've seen the bad times. They're gonna probably hold on to it."

– Options Trading founder Imran Lakha, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover"

The Takeaway: Donating Dead Wallets

It's the nightmare of every NFT collector. In April 2021, Web3 impresario Farokh Samad lost the seed phrase of a wallet containing 87 non-fungible tokens, including an especially rare Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. At the time, the total value of the collection was about 250 ETH or $850,000, but it might as well have been nothing. Without the seed phrase, Samad couldn't access the wallet, so he couldn't sell his NFTs.

Samad isn't alone. Lots of NFT collectors have created wallets to buy NFTs and then lost the seed phrase, especially in the early days of the NFT market, when no one realized it would take off. For example, one anonymous wallet contains 141 CryptoPunks NFTs. The owner of the wallet bought the tokens in 2017 for about $7 each, and today the collection is worth more than $100 million. But the wallet hasn't been used since 2017, and everyone suspects the owner forgot the seed phrase. Oops.

Brian Frye is a law professor at the University of Kentucky and conceptual artist who works with NFTs.

Losing your seed phrase is the worst thing that can happen to an NFT collector. If a hacker steals your NFTs, at least there's some chance of getting them back. But if you lose your seed phrase, you still own your NFTs, you just can't sell them. And an NFT you can't sell is effectively worthless.

Or is it? Maybe there's a workaround.

For better or worse, it was inevitable that art museums would start collecting NFTs. And many of them have. On Feb. 13, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced a donation of 22 NFTs worth millions of dollars from pseudonymous NFT collector Cozomo de' Medici. And on Feb. 10, Le Centre Pompidou announced the acquisition of 18 NFTs by 13 artists.

Only later did NFT artist David Lisser observe that some of the NFTs acquired by the Pompidou hadn't moved wallets.

Has the Pompidou actually acquired the NFTs if they aren't in a Pompidou-owned wallet? Sure, why not. Museums don't need physical custody of an artwork to own it any more than a collector does, and plenty of collectors buy and sell artworks that never leave a freeport warehouse. The same is true of NFTs. The Pompidou owned the NFTs as soon as they were donated. Transferring them to a Pompidou-owned wallet is only a formality.

There's more. Maybe it's wise for museums not to keep their NFTs in museum-owned wallets. After all, NFT theft is rampant, and museums are ripe targets. They're new to the NFT market and vulnerable to the kind of tricks veteran NFT collectors have learned to avoid. Why not let NFT collectors hold donated NFTs in trust for museums, at least until the museums have developed the expertise to properly safeguard them?

Here's where it gets interesting. If museums can acquire NFTs without transferring them to museum-owned wallets, why can't they acquire NFTs in dead wallets? When you lose the seed phrase of an NFT wallet, you can't transfer the NFT to a different wallet, but you still own the NFT.

Sure, the NFT market doesn't value non-transferrable NFTs in dead wallets, which are de facto "soulbound" tokens, by virtue of their owner's forgetfulness. But museums might. In fact, they might be perfect for museums.

Read the full essay here.

– Brian Frye

@brianlfrye

Off-Chain Signals

"The Original King of Crypto Is Back" (Intelligencer)
The Oasis "counter-hack" and the centralization of defi (Molly White)
NFT Games 'Aren't Just About Minting', Says WorldWide Webb Founder (Decrypt)
Jane Street wallet may have been linked to UST depeg, Wintermute researcher says (The Block)
The Zero-Knowledge Moment Has Arrived (The Defiant)

Over the past few months, CoinDesk has been developing a reward system fo Consensus 2023 attendees to bring long-term value. We've partnered with Art Blocks Engine, TokenProof and Passage Protocol to launch the Consensus Multi-Year, Multi-Tiered NFT Ticket, coming on March 2. Learn more.

Bitter Truth

Kudos for making it this far! On occasion, we'll give our loyal Node readers the opportunity to claim DESK, our social token, which is a mechanism for returning the value of engagement directly to the users who create it.